The making of Pretty Polly

Portillo could well make it right to the top. But does he deserve to? The central problem of Michael Portillo - how can the cultured, sensitive soul his close friends admire be in any way related to the crass boor of the platform?

Next week, Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo celebrates his 10th anniversary in the Commons. In another five years he could be prime minister, carried in on a clear blue wave of robust Thatcherite Conservatism. But the accession is not assured. He is loathed even by some Tory MPs, and keeps some rum company. Life probes the enigma of the ex-Ribena Kid and model student nicknamed 'Polly' who waits patiently for John Major to relinquish the underpants of state.

Orgasms come rarely to John Major's Conservative Party, if at all. The 111th annual conference moaned conscientiously for the prime minister's end-of-week speech, but this year it was the Employment Secretary, Michael Portillo, who had most, but not all, quivering in their seats. He knows what his party finds erotic: the old seduction routine of 'them' and 'us'. The repetitive thrust of his speech to the Bournemouth conference was, roughly, 'Down with Europe', with the Belgians taking a lot of his stirring patriotic machismo. 'Stop the rot from Brussels,' he cried, as they groaned for more.

His xenophobia knew some bounds, however. Spanish fishermen had recently been trashing the nets of Cornish boats. A perfect opportunity for the patriot to invoke Sir Henry Newbolt's Drake's Drum: 'Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore, Strike et when your powder's runnin' low/If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o'Heaven/An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.' But Mr Secretary couldn't use that ruse; his family was on the Dons' side in Drake's day, toasting good Protestants, being cruel to bulls and fermenting vats of sherry, and not on ours. The Pythonesque absurdity of a man called Portillo banging the anti-foreigner drum so shamelessly was touched on by two Conservative MPs who had listened to the speech. David Nicolson, the member for Taunton, said: 'It comes to something when standing up for Britain and British values have to be asserted by a Spaniard.' To which John Whittingdale, the member for South Colchester and Maldon and an ardent Thatcherite, growled: 'We're all Spaniards now.' Ole.

Tomorrow belongs to him. Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo stands a seriously good chance of becoming the nation's leader in a few years' time. Next week his 10th anniversary in the Commons will be celebrated by a grand party at the Alexandra Palace. He has been barely touched in the latest seep of sleaze allegations which have mired rivals Jonathan Aitken and Michael Howard. If John Major is defeated at the polls, then Portillo is the obvious candidate of the Tory Right, by far the biggest faction in the parliamentary party. And this despite a confession to a childhood friend when he was at grammar school: 'I want to be prime minister but I never will because my name is Portillo.' He saw himself, then, as someone damned by his surname, a judgment that was proved wrong again and again that heroic October day, when Portillo was lionised by throngs of suits and floral prints. The Tories hurried to the fringe meetings for a glimpse of the coming man. At lunchtime the Connaught Suite of the Connaught Hotel was packed, with an overflow crowd in the garden. At the head of the room stood the orgasmatron of their eye, proclaiming the need for 'Clear Blue Water'; code, easily decrypted, for a more robust, Thatcherite Conservatism than the milky cuppa proffered by Major.

After the meeting he autographed copies of his work, the thoughts, if you will, of Mr Secretary Portillo, also entitled Clear Blue Water and illustrated with a colour photograph on the front cover of our hero, sitting erect, smirking at the camera. Within the thin volume, Sir George Gardiner, the right-wing member for Reigate, writes about Portillo so unctuously as to give the word 'lickspittle' a bad name. Here's a flavour of Gardiner on song: 'These are by no means the last words from Michael Portillo, but I hope readers will agree that they are essential reading in defining the mission of the Conservative Party through the remaining years of this century, and quite possibly beyond.' Of Portillo's collected speeches, the meat of Clear Blue Water, the best that can be said is they remind one of Virginia Woolf's celebration of James Joyce's Ulysses: 'The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.' But that's not important. What is, is that the book means Portillo is running for the big one.

He's playing the long game, however. He will do the odd spot on Newsnight and Radio 4's Today programme, but he does not give interviews to the press, particularly not to the lesser breeds on the more sceptical prints. Unsurprisingly, there had been no reply to my request for an interview. I had, therefore, bought a copy of Clear Blue Water for four pounds and ninety-five pence of the Observer's good money and joined the long queue of the Tory faithful to obtain his signature and my interview.

'Hello! Barbara, Sheila . . .' The two Tory twin-sets in front collapsed in a puddle of delight. He's the kind of guy who is a real wow with the lady of a certain age. In the flesh he is easily the most exquisitely beautiful man in British politics. Private Eye's dig that he has the 'eyes of an assassin and the lips of a tyrant' is too coarse a description. The grooming is immaculate; the clothes, conservative, but tasteful; the thick glossy mop, and, arising from it in defiance of Newton's Law, the perpendicular quiff, a triumph of the hairdresser's artifice; the lean, muscular, strong-necked torso; the dark, saturnine face; the coal-black eyes; the cruel nose; the thick, sensuous lips opening into a pretty smile: no wonder his nickname at school was Polly.

Portillo would be unwise to confuse the adoration of the party activists with the automatic blessing of fellow Tory MPs. Many a knight of the shires loathes him with the contempt of the ugly, stupid spear-carrier for the handsome Adonis, centre-stage. It's hard to get across this feeling in print, as it is always whispered, off-the-record, unattributable. But the hatred is there all right. One MP called him 'Portiyyo' to emphasise his alien origins; another, oh-so-very-wittily, Portaloo. A third pointed out that Clear Blue Water had the same initials as chemical and biological warfare. One MP, asked about the clear blue water of the Portillo doctrine, replied: 'Isn't it that pongy chemical stuff which breaks down the effluent you find at the bottom of your Portaloo?' Once apprised of this intelligence, it is hard to take CBW as seriously as Portillo might wish. When it was my turn to meet the great man, I proffered my copy for his signature. I had added a few words: 'I will give John Sweeney of the Observer an interview,' and asked him to sign below. He smiled a smile as warm as a Saracen's scimitar and drew a thin blue line beneath my scribbling, saying: 'Let's start again, shall we? No commitments,' meaning no interview. And then he wrote in his flowing script: 'To John, Best Wishes, Michael Portillo.' He's not daft, is our Michael. But no one who presumes to rule with our consent can get away with only Gardiner's no-drip gloss on his career. This, then, is another, necessarily muddier version of Clear Blue Water which I, in return, offer to Michael with Best Wishes. Ole.

Portillo may be adored but he is certainly one of the most hated men in mainland British politics. Only the kindest quotes appear in print. When Labour's Robin Cook said: 'Michael Portillo ought to be put back into whatever Victorian novel he escaped from,' it was sweet charity compared to some of the other comment going round. His enemies manufacture the most sulphurous sleaze about him; his friends coat his every deed with sugar. What is interesting is that his friends and enemies do not neatly line up on the Left and the Right. Good lefty Labourites will secretly defend Portillo against the attacks of the Tory mainstream; earnest, decent Majorites privately hate his guts.

He was born on 26 May 1953, after Charles, Justin and Jolyon, the youngest of four brothers. His father, Luis, a refugee from Franco's tyranny; his mother, Cora, a feisty Scot and a descendant of minor Highlands aristocracy. Luis had been professor of law at Salamanca University before Franco's invasion and sided strongly with the republic. Because his brothers were in Franco's army, Luis strived not to be on the frontline and risk killing them, but worked for the cause as a political commissar. Luis managed to escape to Britain when the republic was crushed. He found work with the BBC's Latin American service at Bush House and was liked by colleagues. They found Luis to be a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, correct, beautifully mannered and intellectually fastidious; three out of four of those traits have been passed on to his youngest son. Luis died last year, after suffering from Alzheimer's. Cora Portillo is still alive and well and lives in Hertfordshire where she is a doughty campaigner for the Liberal Democrats. She didn't want to chat about the Tory black sheep of the family, explaining that she didn't talk to the press, but did so with a delightful girlish giggle.

The Portillo home was a semi-detached in the leafy cul-de-sac of Barn Crescent, Stanmore, a boring north London suburb. Matthew Francis was young Michael's closest childhood friend. They still exchange Christmas cards. 'Their home,' he said, 'was much more eccentric than ours. There were original but significant minor paintings on the walls. Conversation was in Spanish. It all seemed slightly Bohemian. Cora was delightful: a bustler, full of energy, very fast-walking.'

To Francis, now the artistic director of the Greenwich Theatre, 'Michael seemed immeasurably grown up from the first time I met him. I would never call him childish. There was no question that whatever charisma means, he had it. It was good, more interesting, to be in his company than not.' Portillo's beauty made him stand out at the age of eight as the Ribena Kid. A snap of his smile was used by the advertisers of the cordial, with the voice-over announcing: 'Each day a little older, a little wiser, a little stronger, each day Ribena.'

In 1964, young Portillo went to Harrow County School, a state grammar, though a rather grand one, with the Thatcherite motto 'Worth not birth'. Along with Portillo and Francis there was young Clive Anderson, already polishing his ad-libs in preparation for Whose Line Is It Anyway?; Geoffrey Perkins, who went on to become a comedy producer on satire shows like Spitting Image; Nigel Sheinwald, a high-flier in the Foreign Office and now our number two in Europe; and, in the same drama club but from the neighbouring Harrow Girls School, Diane Abbott, the first black woman to become an MP. Portillo says: 'I cast Diane as Lady MacDuff; I thought how shy she was . . .' She says: 'He struck me as just another pushy immigrant on the make.'

The praise for young Michael cloys after a while. Jim Golland was Portillo's English teacher. His most famous schoolboy was 'easily the most brilliant pupil I have taught in my life: charming, courteous, hard-working, he used to help with the school magazine. He got an A in every exam he took, an A in O-level Spanish when he was 14. He was top in the 11 plus: it was a wonderful year. If you have half a dozen clever boys, then it is so exciting . . .' Was he ever in trouble? 'No. A perfect and model pupil, pleasant, charming smile, put the others right quietly and diplomatically.' Yuckerty-yuck. As teenagers, Portillo and Francis used to listen to Judy Collins records, get cheapo tickets in the gods to see the opera, wander around the embassies pestering the diplomats for free brochures on life in the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union and play the Bismarckian board game, Diplomacy: 'God, he was good at it!' One of the high points in Portillo's school career was performing in a satirical review, entitled Happy Poison or How We Conquered The Blue Peril, written by Anderson and Perkins. Portillo did the refreshments and typed the programme and, Perkins drily notes, gave himself four credits, more than anyone else.

Another highlight was his role in The Real Inspector Hound, playing a corpse; a third a trip to Paris and Versailles with the lads which ended in recriminations because permission had not been obtained from school. The others were stripped of their jobs as prefects, but somehow Portillo survived. Clive Anderson is not one of nature's reactionaries and clearly implied his disagreement with his old classmate's politics, but he was impressively loyal to Portillo, man and boy. 'My long-term aim is to withhold all the interesting stories about Michael until he is prime minister. He was a Labour Party man when he was at school.' True: Portillo used to have a pin-up of Harold Wilson in his room when he was at primary school.

So why is the old gang so supportive of Portillo, I asked another old friend? Are you lot a mafia? 'No,' said the friend, and added a slightly chilling note: 'Perhaps,' he paused, 'perhaps because we're afraid of him.' Something changed when he went up on a history scholarship to Peterhouse College, Cambridge in 1972. Peterhouse is a slice of echt high-camp England, of porters and privilege, of High Anglicanism, of blood and soil. The floorboards creak with history, nastily. As a student Portillo drank it in, loving the champagne breakfasts, always dressing in a tie, joining a mock-Brideshead set which was satirising the fading but predominant hippy fashions.

Fashions come and go with the tide, but everyone who knows Portillo says that the influence of the history don and rumoured talent-spotter for the secret service, Maurice Cowling, was permanent. Dr Cowling shocks for kicks. To him, the word 'evil' is a compliment. He likes to say that he believes in nothing, which isn't quite true. His weltanschauung can be more easily defined by what he hates than what he holds dear. He hates liberal England, Lord Dacre (the former Master of Peterhouse, proposed by himself) and all the conventional liberal-democratic pieties on race and gender, anything that's going.

Cowling has quit Cambridge for a roguish retreat in a block of flats facing the Bristol Channel, somewhere east of Swansea. He is spry, scabrous, lean, walnut-skinned, alert, has one weak eye which wandered disconcertingly around the room as we talked, and proved to be a darkly charming host. He threw me a few toffees, enough to convey that he is smitten: 'When people like Robin Cook accuse Michael of springing from a Victorian novel, there is some truth in that. I believe that he has a really considered view of everything, the whole political process, which isn't just reducible to right-wing Thatcherism. Maybe she had that width, I don't know, but he certainly has.' To the Cambridge newspaper, Varsity, he said of Portillo last year: 'The great thing about him is that he never belonged to the Cambridge University Conservative Association. He wasn't an undergraduate politician and therefore remains a member of the human race.' Cowling's books are more revealing than the man.

The Impact Of Labour: 1920-1924 (Cambridge University Press, 1971) sets out his 'strong men' view of history, of a claque of high politicians who control the destiny of millions as if it was so much Play-Do. He moved into dangerous territory with the publication of The Impact Of Hitler: British Politics And British Policy, 1933-1940 (CUP, 1975). His analysis, he wrote, 'demands the assumption that it was neither morally obligatory nor prudentially self-evident that Hitler should be obstructed in eastern Europe'; in other words that Britain going to war in 1939 had been a liberal delusion.

Further, Cowling criticised the liberal historian Sir Lewis Namier, born Bernstein in Poland of Russian Jewish origin, for his 'crude memorials to his fellow Jews' and said that the British fascist Oswald Mosley was 'unlucky in the timing of his main acts as a politician.' Mosley's fortunes were further adversely affected, wrote Cowling, by 'Jewish immigration and the prospect of a war 'on behalf of Jewish interests'. Cowling returned to his theme that 1939 was an error of judgment in the Sunday Telegraph (12 August 1989), arguing that 'it is wrong to assume that a dominant Germany would have been more intolerable to Britain than the Soviet Union was to become, or that British politicians had a duty to risk British lives to prevent Hitler behaving intolerably against Germans and others'. Portillo is not responsible for the thoughts inside the white-haired head of his old tutor. But for anyone who has read The Impact Of Hitler carefully it is, perhaps, quietly surprising that Portillo chose to host the party launching a festschrift for Cowling, Public And Private Doctrine: Essays in British History (published by CUP) in January this year.

No one has ever asked Portillo if he concurs with the argument made by his master in The Impact Of Hitler that 1939 was a mistake. (He won't talk to the Observer.) Perhaps someone should. Cambridge friends agree that Portillo drank deeply of Cowling's high cynicism. But his tutor was to perform another signal service for Portillo within a short while. After he went down he got a job with the Ocean Transport and Trading Company, based at Heathrow. Within a year he was bored silly. He went back to Cowling and pleaded with him to effect an introduction to Conservative Central Office. There, he was nurtured by a second powerful influence, Alastair Cooke, the Powellite Svengali of Tory intellectuals.

This autumn Cooke introduced Portillo at a Bournemouth fringe do. At this function, Cooke exhibited some striking characteristics: a curiously defoliated moustache, a fruit gum-flavoured voice and a tic of eyeballing the ceiling as he spoke. Most striking of all, however, was the depth of his admiration for Portillo, falling just this side of infatuation. Cooke and Portillo together smacked a little of the relationship between the ancient blind man and Grasshopper in the TV series Kung Fu.

Within three years of joining Central Office as a back-room boy, he was briefing Opposition leader Margaret Thatcher during the 1979 election, a plum job, but not an easy one. Thatcher fell for his boyish charm and what Cowling calls Portillo's 'hard, practical intelligence'. He was on the ladder, going up.

Portillo married Carolyn Eadie, his old childhood sweetheart, in 1982, shortly before he had his first, unsuccessful go at standing for parliament. Carolyn is adored by the Harrow County mafia: a witty, decent, fine woman, they say. One friend said they had hoped for children, but these hopes were dashed when Carolyn had a mastectomy to treat breast cancer. She is very much her own woman, a head-hunter in the City who probably doesn't earn quite so much as the quarter of a million pounds a year it says in the cuttings. (Journalists love topping up other people's salaries.) Far from being rich beyond the dreams of avarice, it is possible that Michael and Carolyn might, with their expensive lifestyle and homes in town and country, have an overdraft just like everyone else.

In 1983 Portillo became adviser to Cecil Parkinson, then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. He had to drive poor, doomed Cecil from the Blackpool conference, as Sarah Keays took her revenge. . . Earlier that year he had stood against Labour MP Jeff Rooker in the no-hope Birmingham, Perry Barr seat. He used a megaphone to shout his belief in hanging; Rooker secured nine times his previous majority. Portillo's big break came at the 1984 party conference, when the Brighton bomb killed the Southgate MP, Sir Anthony Berry. He defeated 200 candidates to fight the by-election. He was in. Since then, he has rarely put a foot wrong. His career on the backbenches was a model one: dry on economics, pro-hanging, a single, judicious rebellion on fluoridisation. The Harrow County mafia noted a change. They were informed that he didn't want to be called 'Polly' any more.

In 1986 he got into government as a whip, the silent secret police. In 1987 he was promoted to Under Secretary for Social Services. A year later he became a junior minister at transport. In 1990 he got another promotion, this time to environment, where he defended the poll tax against all comers, telling the Tory party conference that the hated tax could be an 'election winner'. Well, nearly right. The tax did for Lady Thatcher, but it has never stuck to him.

In 1992 John Major appointed him to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He was its youngest member. According to one Cambridge friend: 'He confessed to surreal moments when in the Cabinet room when he's found himself thinking: 'Can I believe I'm here?' He came on the stage of the national pantomime setting himself up to be booed. He told the Commons on 15 July 1993: 'Ideally a Chief Secretary to the Treasury should be flinty-eyed, stone-hearted and odious. I believe that I fit the bill.' But the stage villain belied the cautious reality. Capital spending programmes were dropped, but the basic shape of the big-spend welfarist departments didn't change. Far from being the swingeing axeman that the Portillo The Bogeyman propaganda would suggest, he didn't cut that much. But in British politics, all that counts is the score on the clap-o-meter.

He coupled the Bogeyman act with being rude about foreigners and being very rude about what Lady Thatcher calls the 'Belgian Empire', so much so that he became one of Major's right-wing 'bastards'. This summer Portillo's star waned when he mixed it with the disabled lobby, but the view of Tory maverick Alan Clark remains favourable: 'OK, so a lot of people hate him but all it does is to raise his profile.' He keeps rum company. One adviser who contributed to his 'Stop the rot from Brussels' speech is perhaps even more disliked than Portillo: David Hart, he of the Charlie Chan moustache. Hart helped sabotage the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984-85 pit strike. Portillo-haters describe Hart as 'fascist', which is unfair. It is true to say of him that he is to the left of Benito Mussolini, but quite how far to the left is the matter open to conjecture. He did bankroll a restricted circulation newsletter known as British Briefing, edited by M15's former Witchfinder-General, Charles Elwell, erstwhile director of 'F' branch, which tracks 'domestic subversives'. Suffice to say that BB's editorial policy was a literary version of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream.

Hart has had a 'past': he's been bankrupt, named his first son Bimbo and is extraordinarily rich. He helicopter-commutes between London and his pad in Suffolk, where he has an embarrassment of acres. Politically, he is an extreme libertarian, engagingly so: anti-hanging, pro- Serbian hegemony ' eh? ' Jewish and amusingly anti-Major. This, in a party where jibes that Mrs Thatcher had more Estonians than Etonians in her Cabinet, matters. He is regarded so universally as 'sinister' that he probably isn't. Another Cabinet minister who drops into his dinner parties is Malcolm Rifkind, who is very much on the left of the party. This summer Hart and Portillo went hiking in Scotland. Hart's continued presence in the Portillo court shows that our hero still takes risks. A more cautious contender would have dropped him.

But that does not mean he has the leadership sewn up, once Major finally takes off the underpants of state. Many of his electors fear him. The electorate is not the party conference, but his fellow Tory MPs. They admire competence and adore a winner, which Portillo is. But many dislike the vulgarity of his xenophobia, the high cynicism of his politics and his lack of passion. The 'Planet Portillo' squib works because it speaks to a robotic, android quality about him. He's too controlled to be quite human, they say, and that, in a man who wants to be leader, matters.

Will he make it? Lady Thatcher certainly hopes so. His pair in the House, Labour's Marjorie Mowlem, went along to a party at which the Lady performed the ceremony of true succession: 'It was a very clear crowning. It was all: 'Michael, my boy, take over, you are my heir . . .' He could well make it. But does he deserve to?

This brings us to the central problem of Michael Portillo. How can the cultured, sensitive soul his close friends admire be in any way related to the crass boor of the platform? His two most outrageous efforts took place at the start of this year. In January Cowling's star pupil had the gall to make a speech in which he denounced the new British disease, 'cynicism'. One can hear Cowling's snort of glee at this, all the way from Swansea. A few days later he told Tory students at Southampton University: 'Go to any other country and when you have got an A-level you have bought it. Go to a number of other countries and you would win contracts because your cousin was a minister or because you have lined the pocket of some public official.' Any other country, eh? To drop one's cynical guard for a moment it is genuinely depressing that the best player in the coming Conservative Party generation stoops to a petty and dispiriting pseudo-nationalism. His speechwriter Hart may admire the Serbian land-grab, but to those of us who have witnessed it at first hand it looks like nationalism at its most revolting. The Brussels gravy train, for all its corruption, is better than Milosevic, something Portillo should bear in mind. After all, he is the son of a refugee from civil war.

Back at Bournemouth, Portillo was addressing his third adoration meeting of the day. It was a fringe bash for the Conservative graduates in a suitably Greeneian setting, a dingy disco called Raffles with a mirror-ball hanging from the ceiling. 'It's always nice to come in address . . .' There was a huge roar from the graduate faithful at the slip of the tongue. He laughed at himself and had another go: 'It's always nice to come and address the Conservative graduates . ..' At the end of the speech, Jason Hollands, the chairman, cried out: 'You have given us an ideological sword.' The mood was euphoric, blissful, a touch of the Valhallas . . . The Leader had spoken.

Some soundbites from Michael Portillo

'To talk today of the deserving and undeserving poor is guaranteed to make people wince ' a mark of the triumph of political correctness. As in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, if you can banish the words you can ban the thoughts. So our system tends to treat alike the unfortunate and the feckless, the thrifty and the profligate. Consequently it undermines the provident and demoralises the industrious.'

'As people learn to look to the state for a solution to every social problem . . the Good Samaritan passes into oblivion.'.

'Europe isn't working.'

'The chattering classes have succumbed to masochism and deafeatism . . . nihilism has transformed every British institution into an object of ridicule.'

'Those who advised the Royal Family to become more populist and more ordinary probably played into the hands of those who wanted to make of them soap opera or farce. Parliament was, I think, ill-advised to let in the TV cameras . . .'

'We have a free press in Britain. Despite the many occasions when we politicians find it intensely irritating, it is our good fortune that it is free. It keeps politicians honest, and helps prevent corruption.'

'The State has slipped into an attitude of studied amorality.'

'The quiet majority is dismayed by much that goes on around it; standing in the post office queue watching handouts going to people who seem capable of work, reading of yobbos sent on sailing cruises . . . the penalties of fecklessness have been diminished.'

'The New British Disease ' the self-destructive sickness of national cynicism.'

'Fifteen years after the Conservative Party came to power, between us and the party that has sat on the Opposition benches all that time, there stretches still clear blue water.'